Hi Alexander,
You might find the Pragmatic Web community and conference interesting:
http://www.pragmaticweb.info/
and post your ideas to the mailinglist:
http://www.pragmaticweb.info/index.php?option=com_wrapper&Itemid=45
Here the Pragmatic Web manifesto:
http://www.wi1.uni-hohenheim.de/Publikationen/2006/PragWebManifesto.pdf
Best,
Adrian
-----UrsprÃ¼ngliche Nachricht-----
Von: semantic-web-request@w3.org [mailto:semantic-web-request@w3.org] Im
Auftrag von Alexander Zelitchenko
Gesendet: Dienstag, 18. Dezember 2007 10:31
An: semantic-web@w3.org
Betreff: Semantic Web as Pragmatic Web
Dear colleagues;
I want to show you my article Vi-Fi (“Visible - Findable”) - how to
describe and to search sites with standard and universal semantic-pragmatic
tree: Semantic Web as Pragmatic Web
which (I hope) may be of common interest. Below I provide the Abstract and
the first paragraphs, which you may find also in my blog.
Your comments are much appreciated.
With best wishes
Alexander Zelitchenko, Ph.D.
P.S. Sorry for language mistakes. English is not my first language.
Abstract. The new approach to Web search, which provides powerful
narrow-focused marketing tool for small on-line businesses as well as for
everybody, who want to increase his visibility in Web. The core of approach
is observable (small enough - of the order of tens) standard universal
system of both attributes and their values, which describes requests of
WEB-users and content (offers) of sites in the same language and allow to
calculate easily congruency between query and site. This system is based on
pragmatics (logic of customer’s request) rather than on usual (“pure”)
ontology and is organised as tree. Both web-masters and searchers browse
this tree to describe their sites and queries respectively. The tree changes
until take its ultimate form as approach is realised.
1. PROBLEM
2. APPROACH
3. STANDARD UNIVERSAL SEMANTIC-PRAGMATIC TREE
4. DESCRIBING QUERIES AND SITES
5. SEARCH AND METRICS
6. IMPLEMENTATION AND PROBLEMS
7. INSTEAD OF CONCLUSION
1. PROBLEM
View from the searcher’s side. There are things that may be easy found in
Web, and the things which is very difficult to find . It is difficult even
to understand either they present in Web or not. For example, right now it
was very simple for me to find some information about Semantic Web. I made
search in Google and found article in Wikipedia with a lot of references,
some of them directed me in W3C site etc.. But it was simply impossible (at
least for me with my experience of Web search) to find somebody who proposed
or developed the approach similar to my own. It was even impossible to find
out that nobody elaborated these ideas. If I want to find notebook Toshiba
Satellite 2060CDC, it would be very simple for me to resolve this problem.
But if I want to find cheap, convenient, reliable notebook suitable for my
personal aims, I will need to spend at least some days studying market,
searching consumers forums etc.. Or alternatively, I must buy something
based on advise
of friends or simply something “famous”. The same problem I meet when I’m
going to travel. This is very simple to find some hotel in every city. But
it is very difficult to find “right” hotel for you. And of course, it is
almost impossible to find more or less significant like-minded group, which
shares your views, if these views are not very common. And so on. To say
simply I can find in Web something, that “Big Boys” want to sell me, rather
than what I need indeed.
View from the seller’s side. If I propose some specific things for
specific people, I have very few chances that I will find these people or
they will find me. If I have specific area of expertise and want to sell (or
even propose free) it to somebody, I have chance (at best) to find only very
small friction of my potential clients. The same thing is with search
friends, collaborators etc.. But in all these cases my proposition will
reach a lot of people who do not need it. In other words, if I am not “Big
Name”, I am invisible on Web.
Of course, there are a lot of attempts to deal with these problems, like
EBay Auctions or Yahoo Questions, but all of them can not resolve the
problem of satisfactory matching offers and request on Web. For example,
there are hundreds or thousands places more or less similar to what I need
but there are no any tools to choose from them one or two most appropriate.
2. APPROACH
The roots of described problem are quite obvious: if you say very briefly
of what you want, then you have not too big chance to be understandable,
especially when you want something special. If you try to minimise your
query or description of your site, you cannot find what you do need (but
what you did not say) or you cannot be visible by those who do need what you
offer (but again what you did not describe). Thus, to resolve this problem
both searchers and web-masters must present their needs and offers
respectively in all necessary details explicitly. But this is only one,
necessary, but not sufficient condition. The second (“more sufficient”, but
again not “completely sufficient”) is that they must use the same language.
Ultimate solutions of our problem might be imagine as model of semantic
Web, where the user formulates his query in natural language, the semantic
analyser extracts the meaning of this query and after that semantic search
engine analyses content of sites to find ones which are appropriate for
query. However this idea may be realised today (and perhaps not just today,
but in principle) only for very limited scopes of application. I will not
discuss here all difficulties, which arise when we attempt to create
semantic Web - they are well known, but I want to point at only one of them,
which attracts less attention of developers.
Indeed, the meaning of request often can not be extracted from text of
query, in principle. If somebody ask for “hotel in Florida” he may simply
not state explicitly that he need hotel for holiday with his family. Thus,
special procedure is necessary in many cases to clarify request. At the same
time, not every hotelier put in his web-site, that his hotel especially
suited for leisure. Sometimes he does not do this intentionally - being
afraid to reduce the number of potential customers (i.e. business travellers
may want more specialised for their needs hotel, rather than his “leisure
hotel”), but sometimes he simply do not think in logic of his potential
customers. In the last case he may need special procedure, which help him to
show in the site all aspects of his hotel, which may be potentially crucial
for his customers.
Now I can formulate the central idea of my approach. If both sites and
queries are described in the same formal language, then we may make the
search more focused and make the sites more visible. Two simple
considerations are in a core of this approach. If I offer to customers
exactly what thousand other seller offer, my chance to be “findable” is one
thousandth in best. And if I formulate my need like millions others
formulate their needs, I cannot expect, that I find the site which is right
namely for me. But if I describe my need in some details and in the same
language which web-masters use to describe their sites, my chances to find
what I need increase as well chances of site’s owner to be found by me
increase also.
But every speaker of some natural language has his/her own experience and
this results in that he/she has his/her own “model of world” and uses
his/her own language with his/her own meanings of words. And although the
words themselves are common for all speakers of this language, the different
meanings of them for different speakers (and listeners) make their similar
sounding words, in fact, different ones. To say the same thing in other
words, each person has his/her own system of concepts, and in this sense,
has his/her “own language”. Thus, the task is to replace (for aim of
Web-search) all this different individual “languages” by one common
language. One way to resolve this task is to introduce one standard ontology
and to construct one artificial “language of concept” to force users to
describe themselves in framework of this artificial ontology with help of
its artificial language, rather than to allow them to use their own
(“natural”) models of world, systems of
concepts and languages, with hope to extract the correct meaning from these
natural statements.
What kind of language I mean? The simplest and most natural (in logic of
developer of such system) language of this kind is the language of
attributes/values (systems of concepts). If we propose for simplicity, that
all attributes has the same number of values, then the words in this
language are the matrix { x(i,j) }, where x(i,j) is meaning of predicate
“i-th attribute of object has j-th value”. To make our system of concepts
complex enough to produce tens and hundreds of billions different words,
corresponding to different types of queries and sites, we must introduce
some more or less independent attributes, which describe both queries and
sites.
For example, if we introduce 10 independent attributes, each of them may
have 1 of 10 different values, the total variety of different types of
queries/sites will be 10. Thus, it is enough for searcher (web-master) to
answer on 10 simple questions to make his query (site) different from 10
billions other queries (sites).
Of course, this situation is some model over-simplification. The real set
of attributes and their values is organised in a more complex way - as
hierarchy (tree), where the upper levels correspond to more general
(abstract) concepts and lower ones correspond less general (abstract)
concepts, which disclose meanings of upper concepts. In other words, each
complex attribute itself has its own tree-like structure, which is similar
to ones we use when we browse in a book shop searching the books of specific
theme. But even taking into consideration over-simplification of example
above, its estimation “Ten-ten” (ten attributes, each with ten values) gives
right idea of both complexity of descriptive language and necessary efforts
to use it. Since there are no also any problems to elaborate standard and
simple procedures for describing sites and forming queries (for example,
with using dialog wizards), the approach seems to be very practical.
And the last (by order but not by importance - indeed, it is VERY
important) question is about the character of our attributes. To make
approach practical our concepts must reflect searcher’s pragmatics, i.e.
what searcher needs and what he wants to get from site (to find in Web). In
other words, both queries and sites must be described in the logic of
searcher’s request. In particular, web-master describes what potential user
may find valuable for himself in the site.
Below I provide examples of both the tree of concepts and the simple
language for describing sites and queries.
---------------------------------
Be a better friend, newshound, and know-it-all with Yahoo! Mobile. Try it
now.
--0-1315403096-1197970264=:10220
Content-Type: text/html; charset=iso-8859-1
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit
<DIV>Dear colleagues;</DIV> <DIV>&nbsp;</DIV> <DIV>I want to show you my
article <FONT style="FONT-SIZE: 16pt" face="times new roman" color=#003399
size=1><EM><A href="http://docs.google.com/View?docid=dcchd8d5_7dhm786rb"
target=_blank rel=nofollow><SPAN class=yshortcuts id=lw_1197968563_0>Vi-Fi
(“Visible - Findable”) - how to describe and to search sites with standard
and universal semantic-pragmatic tree: Semantic Web as Pragmatic
Web</SPAN></A></EM></FONT></DIV> <DIV style="MARGIN-BOTTOM: 0in"
align=left>which (I hope) may be of common interest. Below I provide the
Abstract and the first paragraphs, which you may find also in my <A
href="http://pragmatic-web-search.blogspot.com/" target=_blank
rel=nofollow><SPAN class=yshortcuts id=lw_1197968563_1><FONT
color=#003399>blog</FONT></SPAN></A>. </DIV> <DIV style="MARGIN-BOTTOM:
0in" align=left>&nbsp;</DIV> <DIV style="MARGIN-BOTTOM: 0in"
align=left>Your comments are much appreciated. </DIV> <DIV
style="MARGIN-BOTTOM:
0in" align=left>&nbsp;</DIV> <DIV style="MARGIN-BOTTOM: 0in"
align=left>With best wishes </DIV> <DIV style="MARGIN-BOTTOM: 0in"
align=left>Alexander Zelitchenko, Ph.D.</DIV> <DIV style="MARGIN-BOTTOM:
0in" align=left>&nbsp;</DIV> <DIV style="MARGIN-BOTTOM: 0in"
align=left>P.S. Sorry for language mistakes. English is not&nbsp;my first
language.</DIV> <DIV style="MARGIN-BOTTOM: 0in" align=left>&nbsp;</DIV>
<DIV style="MARGIN-BOTTOM: 0in"><I><FONT face="Times New
Roman"><U>Abstract.</U> The new approach to Web search, which provides
powerful narrow-focused marketing tool for small on-line businesses as well
as for everybody, who want to increase his visibility in Web. The core of
approach is observable (small enough - of the order of tens) standard
universal system of both attributes and their values, which describes
requests of WEB-users and content (offers) of sites in the same language and
allow to calculate easily congruency between query and site. This system is
based on pragmatics (logic of customer’s request) rather than on usual
(“pure”) ontology and is organised as tree. Both web-masters and searchers
browse this tree to describe their sites and queries respectively. The tree
changes until take its ultimate form as approach is realised.
</FONT></I></DIV> <DIV style="MARGIN-BOTTOM: 0in"><FONT face="Times New
Roman"></FONT>&nbsp;</DIV> <DIV style="MARGIN-BOTTOM: 0in"><FONT
face="Times New Roman"></FONT>&nbsp;</DIV> <DIV style="MARGIN-BOTTOM:
0in"><FONT face="Times New Roman">1. PROBLEM</FONT></DIV> <DIV
style="MARGIN-BOTTOM: 0in"><FONT face="Times New Roman">2.
APPROACH</FONT></DIV> <DIV style="MARGIN-BOTTOM: 0in"><FONT face="Times New
Roman">3. STANDARD UNIVERSAL SEMANTIC-PRAGMATIC TREE </FONT></DIV> <DIV
style="MARGIN-BOTTOM: 0in"><FONT face="Times New Roman">4. DESCRIBING
QUERIES AND SITES</FONT></DIV> <DIV style="MARGIN-BOTTOM: 0in"><FONT
face="Times New Roman">5. SEARCH AND METRICS</FONT></DIV> <DIV
style="MARGIN-BOTTOM: 0in"><FONT face="Times New Roman">6. IMPLEMENTATION
AND PROBLEMS</FONT></DIV> <DIV style="MARGIN-BOTTOM: 0in"><FONT face="Times
New Roman">7. INSTEAD OF CONCLUSION</FONT></DIV> <DIV style="MARGIN-BOTTOM:
0in"><FONT face="Times New Roman"><BR></FONT></DIV> <DIV
style="MARGIN-BOTTOM: 0in" align=center><I><B><FONT face="Times New
Roman">1. PROBLEM</FONT></B></I></DIV> <DIV style="MARGIN-BOTTOM:
0in"><FONT face="Times New Roman"></FONT>&nbsp;</DIV> <DIV
style="MARGIN-BOTTOM: 0in"><FONT face="Times New Roman"><I>View from the
searcher’s side.</I> There are things that may be easy found in Web, and the
things which is very difficult to find . It is difficult even to understand
either they present in Web or not. For example, right now it was very simple
for me to find some information about Semantic Web. I made search in <SPAN
class=yshortcuts id=lw_1197968563_2 style="CURSOR: hand; BORDER-BOTTOM:
#0066cc 1px dashed">Google</SPAN> and found article in
<SPAN class=yshortcuts id=lw_1197968563_3 style="CURSOR: hand;
BORDER-BOTTOM: #0066cc 1px dashed">Wikipedia</SPAN> with a lot of
references, some of them directed me in W3C site etc.. But it was simply
impossible (at least for me with my experience of Web search) to find
somebody who proposed or developed the approach similar to my own. It was
even impossible to find out that nobody elaborated these ideas. If I want to
find <SPAN class=yshortcuts id=lw_1197968563_4 style="CURSOR: hand;
BORDER-BOTTOM: #0066cc 1px dashed">notebook Toshiba</SPAN> Satellite
2060CDC, it would be very simple for me to resolve this problem. But if I
want to find cheap, convenient, reliable notebook suitable for my personal
aims, I will need to spend at least some days studying market, searching
consumers forums etc.. Or alternatively, I must buy something based on
advise of friends or simply something “famous”. The same problem I meet when
I’m going to travel. This is very simple to find some
hotel in every city. But it is very difficult to find “right” hotel for
you. And of course, it is almost impossible to find more or less significant
like-minded group, which shares your views, if these views are not very
common. And so on. To say simply I can find in Web something, that “Big
Boys” want to sell me, rather than what I need indeed.</FONT></DIV> <DIV
style="MARGIN-BOTTOM: 0in"><FONT face="Times New Roman"><BR></FONT></DIV>
<DIV style="MARGIN-BOTTOM: 0in"><FONT face="Times New Roman"><I>View from
the seller’s side.</I> If I propose some specific things for specific
people, I have very few chances that I will find these people or they will
find me. If I have specific area of expertise and want to sell (or even
propose free) it to somebody, I have chance (at best) to find only very
small friction of my potential clients. The same thing is with search
friends, collaborators etc.. But in all these cases my proposition will
reach a lot of people who do not need
it. In other words, if I am not “Big Name”, I am invisible on Web.
</FONT></DIV> <DIV style="MARGIN-BOTTOM: 0in"><FONT face="Times New
Roman"><BR></FONT></DIV> <DIV style="MARGIN-BOTTOM: 0in"><FONT face="Times
New Roman">Of course, there are a lot of attempts to deal with these
problems, like EBay Auctions or Yahoo Questions, but all of them can not
resolve the problem of satisfactory matching offers and request on Web. For
example, there are hundreds or thousands places more or less similar to what
I need but there are no any tools to choose from them one or two most
appropriate. </FONT></DIV> <DIV style="MARGIN-BOTTOM: 0in"><FONT
face="Times New Roman"><BR></FONT></DIV> <DIV style="MARGIN-BOTTOM: 0in"
align=center><I><B><FONT face="Times New Roman">2.
APPROACH</FONT></B></I></DIV> <DIV style="MARGIN-BOTTOM: 0in"><FONT
face="Times New Roman"><BR></FONT></DIV> <DIV style="MARGIN-BOTTOM:
0in"><FONT face="Times New Roman">The roots of described problem are quite
obvious: if you say very briefly of what you want, then you have not too
big chance to be understandable, especially when you want something special.
If you try to minimise your query or description of your site, you cannot
find what you do need (but what you <I>did not</I> say) or you cannot be
visible by those who do need what you offer (but again what you <I>did
not</I> describe). Thus, to resolve this problem both searchers and
web-masters must present their needs and offers respectively in <I>all
necessary</I> details <I>explicitly</I>. But this is only one, necessary,
but not sufficient condition. The second (“more sufficient”, but again not
“completely sufficient”) is that they must use the <I>same</I>
language.</FONT></DIV> <DIV style="MARGIN-BOTTOM: 0in"><FONT face="Times
New Roman"><BR></FONT></DIV> <DIV style="MARGIN-BOTTOM: 0in"><FONT
face="Times New Roman">Ultimate solutions of our problem might be imagine as
model of semantic Web, where the user formulates
his query in natural language, the semantic analyser extracts the meaning
of this query and after that semantic search engine analyses content of
sites to find ones which are appropriate for query. However this idea may be
realised today (and perhaps not just today, but in principle) only for very
limited scopes of application. I will not discuss here all difficulties,
which arise when we attempt to create semantic Web - they are well known,
but I want to point at only one of them, which attracts less attention of
developers.</FONT></DIV> <DIV style="MARGIN-BOTTOM: 0in"><FONT face="Times
New Roman"><BR></FONT></DIV> <DIV style="MARGIN-BOTTOM: 0in"><FONT
face="Times New Roman">Indeed, the meaning of request often can not be
extracted from text of query, in principle. If somebody ask for “hotel in
Florida” he may simply not state explicitly that he need hotel for holiday
with his family. Thus, special procedure is necessary in many cases to
clarify request. At the same
time, not every hotelier put in his web-site, that his hotel especially
suited for leisure. Sometimes he does not do this intentionally - being
afraid to reduce the number of potential customers (i.e. business travellers
may want more specialised for their needs hotel, rather than his “leisure
hotel”), but sometimes he simply do not think in logic of his potential
customers. In the last case he may need special procedure, which help him to
show in the site all aspects of his hotel, which may be potentially crucial
for his customers.</FONT></DIV> <DIV style="MARGIN-BOTTOM: 0in"><FONT
face="Times New Roman"><BR></FONT></DIV> <DIV style="MARGIN-BOTTOM:
0in"><FONT face="Times New Roman">Now I can formulate the central idea of my
approach. If both sites and queries are described in the <B>same formal</B>
language, then we may make the search more focused and make the sites more
visible. Two simple considerations are in a core of this approach. If I
offer to customers exactly
what thousand other seller offer, my chance to be “findable” is one
thousandth in best. And if I formulate my need like millions others
formulate their needs, I cannot expect, that I find the site which is right
namely for me. But if I describe my need in some details and in the
<I>same</I> language which web-masters use to describe their sites, my
chances to find what I need increase as well chances of site’s owner to be
found by me increase also. </FONT></DIV> <DIV style="MARGIN-BOTTOM:
0in"><FONT face="Times New Roman"><BR></FONT></DIV> <DIV
style="MARGIN-BOTTOM: 0in"><FONT face="Times New Roman">But every speaker of
some natural language has his/her own experience and this results in that
he/she has his/her own “model of world” and uses his/her own language with
his/her own <I>meanings</I> of words. And although the words themselves are
common for all speakers of this language, the different meanings of them for
different speakers (and listeners) make their similar
sounding words, in fact, different ones. To say the same thing in other
words, each person has his/her own system of concepts, and in this sense,
has his/her “own language”. Thus, the task is to replace (for aim of
Web-search) all this different individual “languages” by one common
language. One way to resolve this task is to introduce one standard ontology
and to construct one artificial “language of concept” to force users to
describe themselves in framework of this artificial ontology with help of
its artificial language, rather than to allow them to use their own
(“natural”) models of world, systems of concepts and languages, with hope to
extract the correct meaning from these natural statements. </FONT></DIV>
<DIV style="MARGIN-BOTTOM: 0in"><FONT face="Times New
Roman"><BR></FONT></DIV> <DIV style="MARGIN-BOTTOM: 0in"><FONT face="Times
New Roman">What kind of language I mean? The simplest and most natural (in
logic of developer of such system) language of this kind
is the language of attributes/values (systems of concepts). If we propose
for simplicity, that all attributes has the same number of values, then the
words in this language are the matrix { <B>x(i,j)</B> }, where <B>x(i,j)</B>
is meaning of predicate “<B>i</B>-th attribute of object has <B>j</B>-th
value”. To make our system of concepts complex enough to produce tens and
hundreds of billions different words, corresponding to different types of
queries and sites, we must introduce some more or less <I>independent</I>
attributes, which describe both queries and sites. </FONT></DIV> <DIV
style="MARGIN-BOTTOM: 0in"><FONT face="Times New Roman"><BR></FONT></DIV>
<DIV style="MARGIN-BOTTOM: 0in"><FONT face="Times New Roman" size=2>For
example, if we introduce 10 independent attributes, each of them may have 1
of 10 different values, the total variety of different types of
queries/sites will be 10<IMG height=21
src="http://docs.google.com/File?id=dcchd8d5_8c69vffj6" width=14
align=bottom border=0 name=graphics1>. Thus, it is enough for searcher
(web-master) to answer on 10 simple questions to make his query (site)
different from 10 billions other queries (sites). </FONT></DIV> <DIV
style="MARGIN-BOTTOM: 0in"><FONT face="Times New Roman"><BR></FONT></DIV>
<DIV style="MARGIN-BOTTOM: 0in"><FONT face="Times New Roman">Of course, this
situation is some model over-simplification. The real set of attributes and
their values is organised in a more complex way - as hierarchy (tree), where
the upper levels correspond to more general (abstract) concepts and lower
ones correspond less general (abstract) concepts, which disclose meanings of
upper concepts. In other words, each complex attribute itself has its own
tree-like structure, which is similar to ones we use when we browse in a
book shop searching the books of specific theme. But even taking into
consideration over-simplification of example above, its estimation “Ten-ten”
(ten attributes, each
with ten values) gives right idea of both complexity of descriptive
language and necessary efforts to use it. Since there are no also any
problems to elaborate standard and simple procedures for describing sites
and forming queries (for example, with using dialog wizards), the approach
seems to be very practical.</FONT></DIV> <DIV style="MARGIN-BOTTOM:
0in"><FONT face="Times New Roman"><BR></FONT></DIV> <DIV
style="MARGIN-BOTTOM: 0in"><FONT face="Times New Roman">And the last (by
order but not by importance - indeed, it is VERY important) question is
about the character of our attributes. To make approach practical our
concepts must reflect searcher’s <B>pragmatics</B>, i.e. what searcher needs
and what he wants to get from site (to find in Web). In other words, both
queries and sites must be described in the logic of searcher’s request. In
particular, web-master describes what potential user may find valuable for
himself in the site. </FONT></DIV> <DIV
style="MARGIN-BOTTOM: 0in"><FONT face="Times New Roman"><BR></FONT></DIV>
<DIV style="MARGIN-BOTTOM: 0in"><FONT face="Times New Roman">Below I provide
examples of both the tree of concepts and the simple language for describing
sites and queries. </FONT></DIV><p>&#32;
<hr size=1>Be a better friend, newshound, and
know-it-all with Yahoo! Mobile. <a
href="http://us.rd.yahoo.com/evt=51733/*http://mobile.yahoo.com/;_ylt=Ahu06i
62sR8HDtDypao8Wcj9tAcJ "> Try it now.</a>
--0-1315403096-1197970264=:10220--